Balloons eBook

And then suddenly Maurice saw Madame Marly. She
was without a hat and scattering her terrified staff
with her eye.

She came straight to him, her voice was mocking.

“Maintenant, je peux donner des renseignements
a Monsieur.”

“I did not know,” he blurted, “I
had no idea,” and then as the ultimate significance
of their meeting disentangled itself from the immediate
embarrassment,

“Thank God, I have found you.”

* * * *
*

Mlle. de Marveau married the Comte de Cely.

The Comtesse de Cely wanted an escape and became Madame
Lalli.

Madame Lalli wanted an escape and became Madame Marly—­for
Paula was always Paula.

And then she met Maurice and her youth. Twenty-five
years of age and experience and disappointment fell
from her. But to keep her great illusion she
offered her big resistance....

And then the tiny knife turned in the tiny wound.
The unconscious buzzing machine touched the exposed
nerve—­the silly, absurd, irrelevant name.

The lover in pursuit of the beloved became the novelist
examining the dressmaker, seeking for information.
When professional meets professional.

This time she capitulated for she ran away.

* * * *
*

That night Maurice wrote to her.

“Paula, I love you. I loved you always.
I loved you invulnerable, wise, fortified beyond the
wiles of men. How much more do I love you now
with your one weak spot—­so weak, so absurd
that it can only be kissed, and laughed at and adored.

“Paula, my own, the twenty-five years have never
existed. There is only one immortal moment—­and
that is to come.

“Beloved, best beloved, only beloved, I want
you so badly.

“MAURICE.

“Besides, you have got to describe me several
dresses for my new book.”

XIII

AULD LANG SYNE

[To HAROLD NICOLSON]

It was delightful to be back in England after two
and a half years. Two and a half years of India,
of pomp and circumstance and being envied, of heat
and homesickness and loneliness. How starved she
had felt—­starved of little intellectual
coteries with their huge intellectual sensations—­starved
of new books and old pictures and music, of moss roses
and primroses and bluebell woods, starved even into
the selfishness of coming home, urged away by Robert,
who did not know how to be selfish. Thinking
of him made her feel very tender and very small.
His iron public spirit, his inevitable devotion to
duty, unconscious and instinctive and uncensorious,
combined with a guilty sense that her youth and beauty
had been uprooted by him, and put into a dusty distant
soil. He was more convinced than any one of the
importance of books and music and intellectual interests